An application of economic theories and concepts to water management in New Zealand

This report describes an economic assessment of the policies and strategies used to manage water resources in New Zealand. A number of economic theories which relate to water allocation and water pollution control are outlined, with an emphasis on pricing theory. Results of a survey undertaken on charges made for municipal water and sewerage services and regional water board charges are given. The strategies used in New Zealand to manage water resources and to provide finance for water-related services are then evaluated in the light of overseas policies, and the strategies suggested by economic theory. It is concluded that a greater use of pricing policies based on marginal cost pricing, which relates charges to the cost of providing water services, would lead to a more efficient and equitable allocation of water resources. Specific recommendations for changes to water supply and sewerage service pricing, and for changes to existing water and soil management legislation are outlined

Next generation sequencing on soil samples from Etosha National Park: Diversity studies of an anthrax reservoir.

Nutrient availability is important for microbes in soil environments. When an animal dies and decomposes, nutrients are released into the soil. This may cause a shift in the diversity of microbes present, as well as lead to the introduction of new species into the already established microbial community. In the present study shot-gun metagenomic sequencing was used in order to investigate microbial changes in the soil before and after an influx of nutrients from two anthrax carcasses in Etosha National Park, Namibia. In addition, the study investigated temporal fluctuations in the microbial community after the introduction of nutrients and Bacillus anthracis (B. anthracis), the causative agent of anthrax. The final aspect of the study locked at the phylogeny of the two B. anthracis isolates from the anthrax carcasses and how they compared to published B. anthracis data. Soil samples were collected at six time-points during the first month after the death of two zebras, within the area of bloodspill from the carcasses. DNA was isolated and sequenced using Illumina MiSeq. The resulting metagenome sequences were cleaned, before taxonomical composition and abundance were determined using the programs metaxa2 and MetaAmp. A clear responsive community was found, were orders like Bacilliales, Fusobacteriales and Clostridiales increased after the zebras were introduced and then decreased during the sample period. The sequences that caused the increase of the Fusobacteriales order was from Fusobacteriales equinum, which is known to inhabit the mucosa of horses, indicating a species directly introduced by the zebra. Throughout the sampling period many orders were found to be non-responsive. These orders included the Frankiales, known to degrade organic matter, and Rhizobiales, known to fix nitrogen. These non-responsive orders likely had a stable level of nutrients available from the soil, and thus were unaffected by the carcass. From each carcass, a B. anthracis colony was grown, isolated and whole genome sequenced with Illumina MiSeq. The sequences were assembled into contigs using Spades and CLC. Various quality controls indicated that better assembly was achieved with the CLC assembly, and the resulting sequence strains were then sent for annotation to NCBI BioSample. Through phylogenetic analysis, the two CLC strains were found to belong to the A.Br.Aust94 branch of the B. anthracis phylogenetic tree. This is supported by several published studies where the A.Br.Aust94 branch was found to be the most prevalent in Namibia. The present study found a fluctuating microbial community in response to nutrients released as the anthrax carcasses decomposed. The Bacilliales order were shown to partly dominate the community in three of the sample times. B. anthracis isolated from the anthrax carcasses were shown to belong to the A.Br.Aust94 branch of the B. anthracis phylogeny

La obtención de la prueba penal en el extranjero: análisis a la luz del Tratado de Asistencia Legal Mutua en asuntos penales entre los países centroamericanos y la experiencia en los tribunales costarricenses

Tesis (licenciatura en derecho)UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ciencias Sociales::Facultad de Derech

Additional file 1: Table S1. of Temporal dynamics in microbial soil communities at anthrax carcass sites

Soil nutrients and soil composition at carcass sites. (DOCX 44 kb

Temporal dynamics in microbial soil communities at anthrax carcass sites

Background Anthrax is a globally distributed disease affecting primarily herbivorous mammals. It is caused by the soil-dwelling and spore-forming bacterium Bacillus anthracis. The dormant B. anthracis spores become vegetative after ingestion by grazing mammals. After killing the host, B. anthracis cells return to the soil where they sporulate, completing the lifecycle of the bacterium. Here we present the first study describing temporal microbial soil community changes in Etosha National Park, Namibia, after decomposition of two plains zebra (Equus quagga) anthrax carcasses. To circumvent state-associated-challenges (i.e. vegetative cells/spores) we monitored B. anthracis throughout the period using cultivation, qPCR and shotgun metagenomic sequencing. Results The combined results suggest that abundance estimation of spore-forming bacteria in their natural habitat by DNA-based approaches alone is insufficient due to poor recovery of DNA from spores. However, our combined approached allowed us to follow B. anthracis population dynamics (vegetative cells and spores) in the soil, along with closely related organisms from the B. cereus group, despite their high sequence similarity. Vegetative B. anthracis abundance peaked early in the time-series and then dropped when cells either sporulated or died. The time-series revealed that after carcass deposition, the typical semi-arid soil community (e.g. Frankiales and Rhizobiales species) becomes temporarily dominated by the orders Bacillales and Pseudomonadales, known to contain plant growth-promoting species. Conclusion Our work indicates that complementing DNA based approaches with cultivation may give a more complete picture of the ecology of spore forming pathogens. Furthermore, the results suggests that the increased vegetation biomass production found at carcass sites is due to both added nutrients and the proliferation of microbial taxa that can be beneficial for plant growth. Thus, future B. anthracis transmission events at carcass sites may be indirectly facilitated by the recruitment of plant-beneficial bacteria

Additional file 10: Figure S5. of Temporal dynamics in microbial soil communities at anthrax carcass sites

Soil microbial community relationships by time-point and carcass site. Principal coordinate analysis of a distance matrix created by normalised total counts and using Bray-Curtis dissimilarity. Ca1 is represented by the circles and Ca2 by the triangles, the time-points are visualised in different colours and the arrows are pointing in the direction of increasing days, red arrows for Ca1 and light blue for Ca2. The dotted arrows show the relationship between the day 30 to the Ctrl0 sample. The black arrows indicate the 10 most abundant orders and their effect on the soil microbial communities per time-point. Arrows were fitted using envfit with 1000 permutations using the vegan package in R-studio. (EPS 8 kb

Additional file 5: Table S2. of Temporal dynamics in microbial soil communities at anthrax carcass sites

Counts of mapped metagenomic reads of each sample against reference genomes. (XLSX 97 kb

Additional file 11: Table S5. of Temporal dynamics in microbial soil communities at anthrax carcass sites

Overview of the Spearman correlation coefficients of all identified KEGG pathways and their FDR corrected p-values. (XLSX 18 kb

Additional file 2: Figure S1. of Temporal dynamics in microbial soil communities at anthrax carcass sites

Abundance and relative abundance of 16S/18S rRNA taxonomically classified into kingdoms. (a) Raw abundance and (b) relative abundance of metaxa2 classified reads. These are the 16S/18S reads extracted and classified by metaxa2. Roughly 50% of the extracted rRNA sequenced did not get assigned to any taxonomy and were assumed to be false positives. (EPS 1341 kb